This Blog is aimed at Oracle Professionals who are new to the community and looking for advice and guidance. It will hopefully show you where and how to get help but will not tell you how to do your job - that bit is up to you.

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

How to be a good Newbie

What constitutes a 'good' Newbie?

One of the things I've been looking at lately is how Newbies are treated out there in the big, bad world of DBA's, particularly in forums and discussion groups.Some forums and individuals are quite tolerant of Newbies and aim to be helpful, others are just downright hostile.

RTFM seems to be the stock answer of choice these days, with the Newbie often left thinking 'which FM are they talking about!'A previous post on Tom Kyte's blog talks about this in depth.

What I'd like to know is, what do the 'elders' in the community expect from Newbies?

What would make you more enthused to help out?

I received an email from Jeff Hunter outlining the ways in which he believed Newbies could raise their profile.It was very helpful, and with hindsight, most of it is common sense.

These forums are a free service, nobody is obliged to answer a post. Newbies should also not forget that many of the people responding are at work themselves, so they don't appreciate being asked to do someone else's job for them.

Newbies are more likely to get a helpful response if they can prove they have done some thinking for themselves.Sending a post saying "I have a problem, X, I have tried solutions Y and Z, but I still have a problem, what can I try next" is more likely to get a response than "It's broken tell me how to fix it".

http://www.quest-pipelines.com/pipelines/dba/index.asphas a "The Beginner DBA" section in its DBA forum and "Beginner PL/SQL Development Questions" in the PL/SQL Forum.I think the idea is that any-one looking at questions in those areas will have a bit more tolerance (or will reply with a bit more 'teaching').

Tom Kyte's blog has a good posting on asking questions (is anything he does not good ?)http://tkyte.blogspot.com/2005/06/how-to-ask-questions.html

And a 'useful' title (not "SQL question", "Please help", "Error" or "urgent"). If someone has a dramatic thought about your problem over a coffee, you want them to be able to find your thread quickly (before they give up). Something that summarises your problem.

My personal bugbear is the question that is pretty much 'I have a performance problem with this SQL:' and gives an SQL with no explain plan, no table sizes, no indexes.....

Most definitely, ask politely. Demanding that someone fix your problem is a good way to get ignored. Or flamed.

And do NOT post "URGENT MY SYSTEM IS DOWN" messages. Besides the fact that that is what Oracle Support is there for, most of the people will be reading your email message with some sort of time lag and would not be able to respond in a reasonable time, even if they wanted to.

Here is my advice for people asking questions -- not tongue in cheek, and not just for "newbies"

Pretend the person you are trying to describe the problem to is your Mom. Use that level of detail in the writing of the problem (*remember, you would not give a core dump to your mom*). You would be extremely verbose and use simple non-work related terms if you tried to explain the issue to your MOM.

People on the other end of the forum haven't been looking at your problem for hours (like you)

They do not understand your terms you've made up where you work (like you).

They do not know your requirements (like you).

They do not want 50 pages of code, they want to understand the "problem" and the "goal"

This isn't just for 'newbies', this applies to anything. Version, OS, goal - most most important.

I think most people are tolerant of a 'newbie' who shows respect for other's time and efforts. You can show that respect by briefly and accurately describing the problem, the steps you have taken to troubleshoot, books/sites you've perused to try to locate the answer and any relevant details you might have. Use clear sentences and grammar (messages laced with abbreviations are not fun to read).

Finally, ask for assistance not answers. This shows that you want to learn the lesson yourself and are willing to make the effort.

If you can make positive contributions to the forum, your questions will be given a measure of respect.

I'm a newbie myself (somewhat) but an equally important detail (that I think is covered by Tom's "describe it to your mom" scenario - include your O/S, your Oracle version and anything special you're doing (RAC, replication, etc.) that may be pertinent to the problem. A solution offered for 9.2.0.4 will be of little help to someone using 8.1.7 :-D

Hi Lisa,in your post you said "I received an email from Jeff Hunter outlining the ways in which he believed Newbies could raise their profile."

Could you please elaborate on Jeff's recommendations for the benefit of other aspiring DBA's? I'd guess that writing your own blog, participating in forums and writing technical papers would be important.